Social Change and Feminist Rhetorical Ecologies

For this exploratory task, Michael and I decided to propose an archive rooted in location in order to trace feminist rhetorical activity in Tallahassee. As we explain in our proposal for the archive, we would like the archive to collect and house a variety of feminist artifacts, including physical ephemera, locations of action and events, short narratives, and reports on political action. Ultimately, this archive looks to explore what it means to be a feminist and citizen in Tallahassee, and, in so doing, we are better able to show the intersections between personal and public feminist rhetorical activity, specifically as it is experienced locally.

Our inspiration for this archive largely grew out of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s “‘The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron’ Revisited,” in which Campbell address the claims that she made in her earlier article concerning the women’s liberation movement. Campbell asserts that “the personal is political” and that “demands for equal opportunities in education, the workplace, and in the courts could not be separated from the impact of those changes on the self and on interpersonal relationships” (141). We tend to agree; the personal and the political are often difficult, if not impossible to separate. Instead, they are complex and recursive negotiations that may collide, intersect, and transition simultaneously. These relations between personal and public feminist rhetorical activity offer one way to respond to Campbell’s claim that women’s liberation was not a social movement because it was not “a cohesive, organized effort to produce well-defined social change” (139). Personally, I am still trying to make sense of Campbell’s definition of a social movement. Does a social movement need to be unified in order to create change? And, if so, what does that mean for third (or fourth?) wave feminist efforts that resist uniting under to cause of “sisterhood” and instead position themselves as diverse in terms of gender, sexuality, race, age, class, and ability, among others? It is possible that Campbell might distinguish that just because women’s liberation was never a social movement does not preclude social change, but I wonder if she would see that change as too dispersed to address systemic problems.

Theorizing our archive helped me to think through these questions, and while I am not convinced I have solid answers, I do think that I have potential alternative ways of thinking about social movements, subjectivities, and feminist rhetorical activity. A start might be to consider feminist social movements through the lens of rhetorical ecologies. Jenny Edbauer offers a framework for rhetoric that “recontextualizes rhetorics in their temporal, historical, and lived fluxes” (9). Accordingly, this model accounts for the ways in which rhetorical situations are not comprised of discrete elements. Instead, rhetoric can best be theorized as “a process of distributed emergence and as an ongoing circulation process” (13). If it is possible, as William Hart-Davidson, James P. Zappen, and S. Michael Halloran describe, “to see the rhetorical tradition at work...at points where institutions and technologies are in the process of being shaped,” then the archive we have proposed might help to demonstrate how well-defined social change could arise, even out of disorganized and dispersed efforts.

Additionally, Edbauer’s framework characterizes place as “a space of contacts, which are always changing and never discrete” (10). The social field is both networked and connected, and various discourses cannot be separated from the contexts in which they move. This notion strikes me as similar to Debra Hawhee’s discussion of invention-in-the-middle, wherein “rhetoric is a performance, a discursive-material-bodily-temporal encounter, a force among forces” (24). Hawhee situations invention not as a beginning, but a middle or in-between; likewise, an ecological framework for rhetoric attends to the movement and circulation of various discourses and multiple exigencies. A clear beginning or end is not the goal—it’s a “mixture of processes and encounters” (Edbauer 13). While I am unsure if Edbauer would position rhetorical ecologies as sites of invention, I do think that re-envisioning rhetoric as in-motion and in-between is particularly useful for feminist rhetorical activity. It might help us to better enact Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s invitational rhetoric, in which rhetoric turns away from persuasion in order to achieve mutual understanding. If, as Edbauer explains, rhetoric “emerges already infected by viral intensities that are circulating in the social field” (14), perspective offering might help us to better understand what is virally circulating and how that might shape the discourses of others from various subject positions. Furthermore, by creating spaces to foster participation within feminist rhetorical ecologies, even at the local level, we might take up Hart-Davidson et al.’s call to develop a “participatory tradition with/in the network: a tradition where citizens do not merely browse, but invent, discuss, and negotiate” (138). Therefore, we might begin to theorize rhetorical ecologies as sites of invention, discussion, and negotiation wherein participant-rhetors can make and remake themselves through offering perspectives and listening to the perspectives of others.

Though there are certainly other alternatives, rhetorical ecologies might offer one avenue for considering the ways in which multiple, diverse discourses might collectively participate within a networked ecology of feminist activity. We could better theorize the ways in which these various discourses intersect, circulate, and transform. Moreover, it is possible that by tracing and archiving feminist rhetorical activity in Tallahassee, we might demonstrate how well defined social change could arise, even out of disorganized and dispersed efforts.

Works Cited

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “‘The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron’ Revisited.” Communication Studies 50.2 (Summer 1999): 138-142.

Edbauer, Jenny. “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (Fall 2005): 5-24.

Foss, Sonja K., and Cindy L. Griffin. “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for Invitational Rhetoric.” Communication Monographs 62.1 (Mar. 1995): 2-18.

Hart-Davidson, William, James P. Zappen, and S. Michael Halloran. “On the Formation of Democratic Citizens: Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition in a Digital Age.” The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, eds. Graff, Walzer, Atwill, Albany: SUNY, 2005. 125-140.

Hawhee, Debra. “Kairotic Encounters.” Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, eds. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. 16-35.